Starlight
by Joriel
Summary: Wufei's thoughts on a dark night away from the campfire.


It's dark out here where I sit. Warm, velvet darkness that wraps around me as I watch the distant fire, a bright spot in the night off to my left. Every now and then I can see a silhouette cross the fire, and can generally tell who it is by the shape of the hair. Amazing really, how we all have such distinct hairstyles that I can identify the others by them.  
  
Even more amazing that my gaze keeps straying to the fire to identify them in the first place.  
  
I came out here to be alone, to see the stars without the light pollution of the fire. Here I can concentrate on my thoughts without the others chatter interrupting me. Well, to be fair, without Duo and Quatre interrupting me, it's not as if Heero or Trowa talk all that  
  
much.  
  
A figure with a long braid just walked by the fire, Duo. He confuses me the most out of all of them. In all my contemplations on the subject, I never considered Death to look anything like a talkative american with an amazingly long braid who is always laughing. I imagined Death to be a somber figure, understanding the seriousness of it's existence if it had to have an embodiment at all.  
  
Sometimes I see it in his eyes, that deadly serious underneath the laughter and something inside me shrinks away from him. Heero has more courage than I, he goes everywhere with him. I am positive he even follows the Laughing Death to his bed, and wraps himself around him. Not really all that surprising though, considering how long Heero  
  
courted Death in all it's forms.  
  
Trowa walked by the flames, his odd bangs identifying him clearly. He hides his face beneath that fall of soft brown hair, it is as deliberate an evasion as the clown mask he wears while performing in that circus. I just can't figure out if he's hiding a view of himself to the world, or if he wants to hide the world from himself. I think only Quatre  
  
knows the answer to that. I often watch them sitting quietly together, murmuring in voices so soft it seems to me there is no words to it at all, just a gentle flow of a sort of humming.  
  
I wonder if I will ever know that?  
  
With Meiran it was all too often angry words and shouting, no soft near- wordlessness for us. But then again, we never really loved. We were children playing at marriage, pretending maturity to please our families. It is as that man said in the movie Duo had, "The things you don't know about me could fill the Grand Canyon." Yes, that was characteristic of my doomed marriage.  
  
I'd hoped it would change as we aged, but it was not to be.  
  
It is also characteristic of my relationship with the other four pilots. I like to fight on my own. I don't like to work together, working together brings the black terror inside out, wakes it up. Makes me weak.  
  
I couldn't protect Meiran. What makes me think I can protect anyone else? And when you fight together, you have to watch out for your comrades as well as yourself. So much easier to fight alone, to only have myself to worry about. To not have a chance of failure again.  
  
But that is no to be either. More and more our destinies are intertwined. The missions grow harder and require two or more of us at a time to complete. It is only logical to blend our strengths to create a stronger whole, but...it doesn't' matter how logical it is.  
  
My heart is still weak.  
  
And that is why I'm sitting out here alone in the dark away from the campgrounds. There is something about sitting around a fire late at night, when the world is caught up in that sleepy late night silence that can only exist far from the cities. It creates a sort of intimacy, no matter how well or little you know your companions. And there is an urge to talk, to purge all the worst fears and thoughts of your soul and be made clean in the flickering light. It is what they were doing when I left, one by one giving into the firelight intimacy . Even Trowa and Heero had begun to talk, to tell a little of the dark places they have been and their fears of the dark places they have yet to go.  
  
If I had stayed, I would have fallen into that as well, and begun to talk. And I can't stand the thought of anyone knowing my weakness. Until I am strong, and have conquered this thing inside, I can't sit by the fire at night. So I sit alone under the stars, and wonder who else in the world is sitting like me, staring up at them. .  
  
Starlight is better than firelight for those like me. 


End file.
